Slowly, much too slowly, he began his fade. It took some time to realize because the depths in which he lurked were well out of sight. It seemed he would never leave. But of course he had to. Invited in like a vampire, he had finally sucked the blood out of the place. At long last, forced to emerge from his crypt, he looked smaller and smaller, seemingly impossible, until all that remained was the Cheshire smirk, then nothing.

After eight desolate, desperate, disingenuous years, his reign of error over, he slouched away, the end of his second coming. Quick, build a wall around Bethlehem.

But just as the disinfectant of hope reached the nostrils of those gasping from the stench of corruption, there he was again; back on the friendly airwaves that had so long sought his approval, back with the journalists who knew better than to offend both him and their courtier employers. It had been better had they given him a pass, left him with a megaphone and directions to Speakers’ Corner, an audience well-used to the ranting of the mad. There would have been no single utterance of profanity, nothing on which the authorities could charge him, but the whole would have been truly profane.

Instead of Hyde Park, he got prime time. When you’ve yanked the levers of power that long, people owe you. There were few better than he at reminding people what they owed. So it all tumbled out in one big defense of the indefensible. Still, the case was impressive for its brazenness.

No one could have predicted the financial crisis said he, when in fact many had been sounding the alarm for years. It took no special talent for these people to predict the inevitable; the credit goes to their having said so in such a fearful climate. But to one of the chief architects of the crisis, it was a complete surprise, affirming either the mendacity or incompetence that marked his governance.

It didn’t take Adam Smith, Paul Krugman or Russell Crowe to see that involvement in two large wars while coincidentally bestowing major tax cuts on rich people could terminate in anything but crisis. He couldn’t help but note that massive increase in expenditure and significant decline in revenue was not sustainable. So he did what any leader of nations would do, he called on his country for sacrifice; well some of his country. For sure there were people he didn’t want to bother. No need to inconvenience the web of cronies, busy with their snouts in the public trough, or once and future shareholders, or other procurers of power and influence who might one day be useful in his retaining travel documents.

No, it was easier to ask those who wouldn’t mind so much or at least had no real say. The people of New York promised money to rebuild after the outrage of September 11, 2001 are still waiting. In fact, it seemed any city with the word “New” was in trouble, although in fairness Old Orleans is tough to roll off the tongue. The police, fire, hazmat, intelligence agencies and homeland security all deemed so necessary to prevent future attacks did not receive the investment they required and which was so loudly promised.

Other needs that would seem essential to any modern nation in the 21st century, universal health care, education, research, infrastructure and the EPA were starved for funds, existed in name only or had their mandate corrupted.

Perhaps the most tragic and infuriating example of treacherous financial curtailment was the treatment of the men and women of the US Armed Forces. Having decided, for whatever reason, to fight a second war, he owed it to the soldiers and the country to go all out to win, not to try to do it on the cheap. There was a military guy in his own cabinet and many experienced voices in the Pentagon who counseled overwhelming force. But that meant spending more money and cutting back on the cuts. That meant sacrifice for accomplices whom he wanted to shelter not tax.

Instead of overwhelming numbers, he sought a bargain. Instead of providing the best equipment and best protection for those risking their lives, he sent too many to combat in lightly-armored vehicles and sub-sufficient body gear and told them to drive and run fast.

In fairness, beating a path to Baghdad turned out to be rapid and efficient, something that well- conditioned war re-enactors could have accomplished. To make it vaingloriously official, in a pageant of premature jubilation, his boss put on his old uniform, which was still a fit and not so worn, to make a dramatic landing on an aircraft carrier docked in the San Diego harbor. Maybe the navy couldn’t have piped him aboard, but it wasn’t a long swim.

But getting to Baghdad was never the point. Napoleon got to Moscow but didn’t know what to do afterwards. It was his ruin. Waterloo made it official but the great army froze to death on the Russian tundra. Nearly 200 years later, Iraq became the graveyard of too many American soldiers, far too many of those they went to protect and beckoned the American economy as well.

This wasn’t a national call to arms. It was a call to a few to give up arms and sundry other limbs.

At some point, Iraqi nationalism will overcome tribalism and the catalyst will have been the invasion. Power will not fall to the Domitian-like sons of Saddam in an endless dynasty of repression. But it is reprehensible that when that day comes, he will crow over the result when it was his paucity of thought and investment, his complete incompetence which caused the needless death of so many in the interim. Though the result will be worthy, the cost should never have been so murderous. It is unacceptable to suggest that so many dead and maimed were the price of freedom. That evades the utter ineptitude of his prosecution of the war and mocks those who pleaded for a better way.

His public legacy falls between lies and errors. The financial crisis likely wanders into both. He may not have known the crisis was coming, say no more, but with all of the disingenuous accounting and reporting practices he commissioned, there must have been a hint. Knowing that those to whom he had given massive tax breaks were not about to send that extra money downstream, he saved where he could, by timorously exposing his army to needless danger or by assailing society’s poorest and most vulnerable – so lie-side economics.

However, had he known that the twin follies of lowering taxes and “letting the biggest dog eat” in corporate America would so afflict the comfortable; he may have tried more callously to forestall it. To that point, incompetence wins.

For many in uniform at home and abroad, in hospitals, in poor houses, in schools and in low and middle income neighborhoods across the land, it was lucky he didn’t see the full picture or that he took pains to hide it. He would surely have put the boots to them even harder as opposed to dipping his short arms into the deep pockets of the uncommonly rich.

Now, and ever the wily statesman, as part of his recent hate of much of the union address, he slyly laid a security trap for the new administration. Not accepting that he should be disqualified from speaking on matters of national security, he dared the new guys to modify his Torquemada tactics, predicting a large scale terrorist attack if they did. It was a typically slippery and no-lose declaration. But posing is what he has always been about. It was never the policy, always the politics. Deeper still, it wasn’t the politics, it was him.

It has slipped his discourse that he was riding shotgun when the worst attack occurred. He seems to have forgotten that the outgoing group told him in no uncertain terms about the threat from the blood-thirsty lunatics of Al Qaeda. He also played down the warnings from his own intelligence people that something horrific was happening.

He didn’t fly the planes to their final deadly destinations. There was likely little he could have done to prevent what happened. But of all people, he should have understood that despite all precaution, an attack from organized madmen is problematic. He could have expressed his support for the new guys’ attempts to do the best they could. He could have done the right thing – but it would have departed from a long, dishonest pattern. It’s much easier to make cheap, unaccountable predictions than to offer sage counsel or a pat on the back. Old habits, not matter how odious, are hard to break.

The reason that he can get away with such effrontery, is of course, he is a patriot. Americans are ready to overlook a lot when it comes to patriotism. Despite the emptiness at the core of his being and the abusive father knows best condescension, there was a tough, smart hombre looking after them – the military/financial combo of Frank Burns and Milburn Drysdale.

Though it was easy for him to prattle about war and fighting and sacrifice, outside of photo-ops, he didn’t really want to know these things up close. It should be said, when it was his turn to fight, he was right at the front of the line – the deferment line, five times no less. It was not that he was opposed to the war, any war for that matter, this was no conscientious objector. It’s just that well, there were so many others who wanted to serve or who were not quite as clever as he at working the system. He said later he had better things to do, that it was inconvenient. He was a backroom boy not a frontline guy. He ran and hid goddamit.

When you look back, he needn’t have gone to all the trouble to overcome his A-1 draft status. He could have just explained his limited potential at distinguishing between machine gun toting, grenade throwing, North Vietnamese soldiers and small game birds. He would have been immediately classified 3-F – friendly fire fuck-up.

Years later, his patriotism still in full bloom and bluster, he exposed a spy, a dangerous agent, an enemy to the truth as he saw it. That it was someone working on behalf of the United States didn’t seem to matter. He was willing to put his own employee and countrymen in jeopardy so that he might quench his anger. Despite his best attempt to throw the rovers off the hunt, the truth started pointing his way and he did what any honorable leader would have done, he willingly sacrificed his subordinate – Jim Rockford’s Angel leaps to mind.

Samuel Johnson said that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel – although surely religion would contest that claim. Maybe the word has lots its impact over the years, but scoundrel just doesn’t ring right. Turncoat, quisling and back-stabber seem better options.

His evasive military experience did not temper his willingness to accuse others of being unpatriotic or of creating an atmosphere of fright for those who dissented from his views. He tied his orders to the backs of rats and ran them through the tunnels of Washington to become the daily screaming points for the compliant or complicit media.

He needed the commotion, the cover, the noise, the misdirection. He needed to wave with one hand to distract from the other, a black magic man, a shaman – without the shame.

He wasn’t drafted into public service, he volunteered. But he didn’t volunteer inspired by some noble calling or advancing the public weal. Offering a strong hand to those who through birth, disaster or circumstance needed his help, was not a motivating factor. He didn’t suit up to defend the defenseless, provide for the needy, fix the infrastructure, support research and education nor offer a grand design for the future.

None of these core reasons for the existence of government were responsible for his entry to public life. In fact, the more this vision of government failed the better. By throwing a stick in the spokes, it was much easier to proclaim that government was the problem, not a solution. He hadn’t signed on to makes things work; he was there to sabotage the very body he was charged with administering. Aldrich Ames sold secrets to the Russians and went to jail. The next in line sold lies to the public, secrets to his friends and still gets to talk with pompous gravity on TV.

So fuck the public weal, this was war on government. Get government out of the way and let private industry lead. Reduce the regulatory burden on corporate America and watch it go. Kick the watchdogs in the nuts, so that if they howled they were effectively neutered. Government was an ox-cart in the day of speed, an impediment to getting done what needed to be done, a light that required a blind, a bureaucracy that needed a plunder, an advocacy that called for intimidation.

He was a bottom-line guy and it didn’t matter to him how many fell or were pushed to the bottom. He floated high above the hurly-burly and didn’t even view it as a nuisance. He had a boss to handle the annoyances. The public good was beyond the scope of his consciousness, unable to penetrate his conscience.

Politics was a means to an end, a mean end. It was where policy was enacted to advance the interests of those who could do something in return. It was a career of quid pro quo, of cronyism, of payoffs, of being bought and sold, of favors and of currying favor.

Yet, it may be said, that in the end, at least this end, because history is so wont to repeat its vulgarity, it was his reign that overflowed the reservoir of public apathy. The dam swollen to the breaking point blew apart and inundated the damned.

The great fraud of having people vote against their interests was shown for what it was, propaganda of historical proportion; the State versus the people of the State. Lightly-regulated corporate America, the incontrovertible solution to all financials ills, went down, not like Ozymandias but Pompeii. The inhabitants who had either unknowingly, in good faith or with willful-blindness, trusted in big lies, in the benevolence of greedy run-of-the-mill peckerheads, were ruined. It had all been a shell game and the public could never find the pea. Having invested their life savings in the belief that one day they would guess right, they ended up broke, desperate, unretired or out of work.

But this time the pea had fallen from the palm. Like Peter Finch, the people were mad as hell and they weren’t going to take it anymore. When they couldn’t pay their mortgages or find work or their savings, when they couldn’t feed their families, they finally called bullshit.

When Enron and Madoff and Halliburton and KBR and Dresser and Blackwater ceased to be blurbs on the news or talking points for radicals, when the Stars and Stripes came down and up went the Skull and Crossbones, the gig was up. When the public realized that they had been gang-planked and keel-hauled by a band of pirates, they mutinied. The crooks, accountants in tow, scurried up the mooring lines, back to ships that were soon full speed ahead to the tax sheltered islands from whence they came. And the man whose ideas put wind to the sail, the master of the canard line, sat smugly in his captain’s chair above it all and above the law.

It was his duty to protect the public interest from the robber-barons. But he had been purchased long ago with rotten deals and golden promises. He was a plant, a conduit for special interests, backroom bargains, cozy cronies and media loudmouths. He was well-paid not just for compliance but for proselytizing. It was corruption worthy not of the world’s greatest democracy but in keeping with the world’s worst kleptocracy.

Undaunted, unashamed, uncaring, he goes on. The damage he wrought will take years to undo. He doesn’t see or acknowledge it. Instead he brags that he was the most influential and important person ever in the position, which given the incompetence of his administration, should be confessed not proclaimed.

He doesn’t have to continue and oh that he wouldn’t. He has dined and dealt well and has no need of work. He could easily retire to the woman behind the power, the one who contributed the frosty-faced cant that he mouthed and who fed the Freon to his cold, cowardly heart.

For most people now, not enough, he and his gravitas have proven a myth, another fabrication in the unremitting subterfuge – laid bare as the Potemkin village idiot, all gussied up on the outside, dangerously vacant beyond.

He fooled too many for too long. Not everyone of course. As always Jonathan Swift knew him early and knew him well.

“Come hither, all ye empty things-
Ye bubbles raised by breath of kings-
Who float upon the tide of state,
Come hither and behold your fate.
Let pride be taught by this rebuke
How very mean a thing’s a Duke:
From all his ill-got honors flung,
Turned to that dirt from whence he sprung.”

Copyright © 2009 Paul Heno